Land of the Living

Georgina Harding

A small yet profound masterpiece of war, loss and survival, rendered in prose of rhythmic precision, subtlety and exceptional sensitivityEvery time the dream came it was different and yet he felt that he had dreamt it exactly that way before. The trees, there were always the trees, and the mist and the shadows and the running.Charlie 's experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Assam are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. Starting a family and working the land seem the best things a man can be doing.

But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie 's mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present. What should be said and what left unsaid' Is it possible to find connection and forge a new life in the wake of unfathomable horror'

A beautifully conceived, deftly controlled and delicately wrought meditation on the isolating impact of war and the inescapable reach of the past, Georgina Harding 's haunting and lyrical novel questions the very nature of survival, and what it is that the living owe the dead. Georgina Harding is the author of four previous novels- The Gun Room, The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game and Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Her first book was a word of non-fiction, In Another Europe, recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime. It was followed by Tranquebar- A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a small fishing village on the Coromandel coast. Georgina Harding lives in London and on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex. A small yet profound masterpiece of war, loss and survival, rendered in prose of rhythmic precision, subtlety and exceptional sensitivity